Excerpt - Adam Tooze responds to listener questions
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I mean, the action against USAID, which is America's international aid agency and by far the largest operation like that in the world. I mean, America's ODA, so that's official development assistance, is 30% of all development assistance. Essentially, they've turned it off. They're destroying the infrastructure. They're firing people at random. They're hauling these Americans who have careers and lives outside the United States back to the US. It's utterly spectacular.

and should be front and center because this is going to affect millions of people around the world, programs on which people depend for their livelihoods, for, you know, across the entire gamut. And they're targeting, of course, what they think of as the woke agenda. So they're targeting programs for women. They're targeting programs centered on climate. They're targeting programs for queer and trans people. I mean, it's outlandish and extraordinary. And that's really where our thinking should start because, you know,

It matters that they've singled out USAID because it's the most vulnerable, I think, of the agencies that they could go after. And here we see, and it may turn out to be, as it were, their alibi. We destroyed USAID and so we delivered on our promise and then we can walk away and know in the end Treasury was too hard a nut to crack. So I think the question is, is USAID the single standout case of their destructiveness? And that's massive enough in its implications.

Or is it a precedent for what's coming next? But it's like a January 6th that's actually working, not on the symbolic, you know, not like this irrisible stuff they were doing in Congress, but actually the evisceration of a globally relevant organization. I mean, the huge impact across the entire world.

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